Strunk and White vs. Williams

When I went back an looked over my previous post on Stunk and White, I noticed that I had wrote about the chapter on "Omitting Needless Words". I had a little trouble following Williams' book and couldn't find a section that discussed this exact idea, but Williams does have a chapter on Length, which would definitely be related to omitting needless words.

Often, it seems that students use more words in order to reach a certain required word mark on an assignment. I know that I am guilty of this on occasion. I also talked about how my writing is often very wordy at times and that being concise is sometimes an issue for me. I like how in the beginning of the chapter on length, Williams says, "The ability to write clear, crisp sentences that never go beyond twenty words is a considerable achievement." Like I wrote in my blog on Strunk and White, I very much strive to do this myself and like that I now have two books that can help me achieve this.

While I liked the Strunk and White book because it is easier to read, I feel as though the Williams book gives much more detail. While Strunk and White seemed to be a smaller, more manageable book, I know that I much prefered the Williams book for all the examples he provided in his book. Having these examples made the book a little more difficult to read, but gave me a good idea of what I needed to do to make my writing more concise. I could see in the examples of the poor writing concepts that end up in my own writing. Seeing an example of how I could fix this makes it easier to spot the mistakes in my own writing.